It’s been over a year since I last looked at the state of humanoid robots, and enthusiasm for the technology shows no sign of waning. Startups NEURA Robotics and Figure AI raised $1.4 billion and $1 billion , respectively, and Apptronik raised $520 million . China’s Unitree went public, raising roughly $900 million , and Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC later this year . A few weeks ago China held the second annual World Humanoid Robot Games, showing humanoid robots per...

A common way to store JSON data is to write one document per line. We call it NDJSON or JSON Lines. Log files, database exports and machine-learning datasets often come in this format. The files can be large, so we may compress them. { "id" : 1 , "active" : true , "user" :{ "name" : "user_1" , "tags" :[ "guest" ]}, "score" : -3862 , "note" : "..." } { "id" : 2 , "active" : false , "user" :{ "name" : "user_2" , "tags" :[ "staff" , "admin" ]}, "score" : 8123 , "note" : "..." } How fast...

Not every presentation needs slides, but when they earn their place, they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than replacing them. Sumeet Gayathri Moghe sets out the principles that follow from that idea — control over the rate of knowledge exposition, tight coupling between slides and speaker, minimalism by default, visuals that say more than words can, and never sending your slides out in advance. more… Not every present...

0.0 Context setting Thursday 29 September in Portland, Oregon, where it is dreary but also not raining. Dreary kind of implies rain? Some sort of pregnantly dreary, I suppose. Gravid with rain but not raining yet. Anticipatory. It’s been just over a week since the last episode and I’ve got to say that every day that I haven’t written I’ve gotten more anxious about not having written. This is not generally speaking helpful because I don’t know about you, but it’s easier to writ...

I’m going to try to avoid falling into the trap of making a bad pun about the season…damnit! ;-) Welcome to the September edition of Interesting Links in the Data and AI World . It’s a bumper edition (aren’t they always), with lots and lots about Kafka and related technologies in particular this month. Oh, and AI. Obvs. I’m going to try to avoid falling into the trap of making a bad pun about the season…damnit! ;-) Welcome to the September edition of Interestin...

Serde is an amazing serialization library for Rust and it has been a huge reason why I felt productive with it for years. However already while at Sentry I got quite frustrated with some of the limitations with it but actually replacing Serde is tricky because of the might that it has in the ecosystem. Also because it’s quite hard to actually do better without also making some potentially painful compromises. Here are three examples of Serde corner cases that show poor interactions of Ser...

Our Moon as imaged by the Galileo spacecraft flying past it on December 7, 1992. Image: NASA Many people think that the Moon is just a gray ball of rock in our sky. Surprisingly, many scientists seem to share this notion. I once had a physicist tell me the Moon is scientifically boring. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. So I wrote this article to summarize the immense scientific and exploratory value of Earth’s cosmic companion. Firstly, consider that the bootprints of Apollo astrona...

It’s common to compare the current AI takeover of software engineering to the rise of AI in chess. Chess AIs went from much weaker than serious players to much stronger than even the strongest humans. Between those points, there was a middle period dominated by “centaurs”: human-AI partnerships that were stronger than unassisted AIs or humans. Lots of people think that we’re currently in a world of software engineering centaurs. According to them, coding AIs are not yet capable enough to...

My relationship with Mastodon has been somewhat tumultuous over the years, until I eventually stepped down from Fosstodon around 18 months ago. I have to say, it was the right decision. I don't miss running Fosstodon one bit. But since then, I've found myself less and less engaged in the Fediverse. Mainly because there's so much outrage over there. It's so tiring. The majority of my timeline is fun, but the outraged minority have ruined for me. To the point where I don't want to be there, ...

Podcast: Play in new window | Download 37:37 – A feedback episode, reading comments about the show from Adam, Alistair, and Abdullah. Discussing my favourite personal shows that are still going ( Into Your Head , The Overnightscape Underground ), task management (Getting Things Done™, the spark to get something started), 1980s British retrocomputers (Spectrums, Amstrads, Orics, and Acorns), coffee (my own snobbery, instant coffee, how supermarkets sell it), and what constitutes a mat...

Anthropic released new eval tooling for Claude Code . Their claude-api plugin now includes a new build_eval and hill-climb command that helps you build evals, check the graders, and improve your application against them. I usually don’t review eval tools because software changes so often that reviews have a short shelf life. But a first-party tool from Anthropic is likely to influence how people approach evals, so I wanted to try it and share what I found. Isaac Flath and I livest...

I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day. OpenAI gave me a free ticket and a seat in the "creator" area for the keynote. You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options . I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging...

In 2024 I started writing monostiches , which are poems that span a single line. Over the last few weeks I have been writing more, and now I have a category page devoted to monostiches . I have been thinking about why I like the monostich form so much. I think there are a few reasons. First, monostiches are short. On days where committing to writing a longer poem can be daunting, writing a single line feels more tractable. This doesn’t mean that monostiches are necessarily easy. I write mo...

Listen I understand that technically I am capable of wearing a sweater at anytime but that’s not what I mean and you know it I can’t wear a sweater right this minute because it’s the hottest part of the day and the hottest part of the day is still a little too hot for sweater. But morning? Evening? SWEATER TIME.  Also I’ve never really thought about the word sweater before and is it the word we used because this is an item of clothing that makes you sweat, hypotheti...

The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... Read More The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... Read More The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... ... Read More Read More

Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love . It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well. Just jogging your memory; I reached out to you (and John Carmack) about how difficult interviewing had become despite me being a stellar engineer at my work. You offered some words of wisdom, wrote me a postcard, which I still hav...

Statistics Netherlands (CBS) revised second-quarter 2026 job growth on 23 September, from a loss of 8,000 jobs to a gain of 15,000. Unemployment, meanwhile, reached 408,000 in August 2026. This roundup of employment in Netherlands statistics covers people in work, age groups, unemployment, vacancies, CAO wages, part-time work and self-employment, using CBS and Eurostat releases published through September 2026. Employment in Netherlands Statistics +15,000 Jobs added in Q2 2026, after ...

Building and testing the aircraft in the two states is projected to support about 9,800 American jobs by the early 2030s and add roughly $78 billion to the Newton and Seattle economies through 2046. NEWTON, Kan. and DES MOINES, Wash., (September 30, 2026) — Shield AI today named the two sites that will build and test X-BAT , its AI-piloted fighter jet designed to take off and land vertically. X-Forge 2, at the Newton City-County Airport in Kansas, is the flight test and sustainment home for...

"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë - good writing, but the protagonists are quite something. There's barely a likable character in the whole story - they are all either crazy, evil, stupid or a combination of these. It's also remarkable to consider how small the world of some people in those times was (pre-Victorian England); whole lives spent within a tiny area, interacting with a handful of other people. And that's for members of the nobility, not some bumpkin on a remote farm. "The Pickle...

I got the following question in an email. My nephew is currently in high school in China and has developed a strong interest in computer science and mathematics. Recently, we've been talking about how computers can solve incredibly complex problems, yet there are still some problems that even the most powerful computers struggle to handle efficiently. I work in backend data maintenance myself, so I often think about how much a system's performance depends on the way a problem is approached,...

Mission-driven startups fail in predictable ways every year because good intentions are no substitute for a theory of change, money, and community involvement. As I found out the hard way, “At least we’re trying to do good” is the most dangerous sentence in social entrepreneurship, because it lets founders skip the boring, specific work that decides whether a venture actually helps anyone. I wrote the first version of this almost twenty years ago for undergraduate students starting their f...

Over the past few years, I spent way more time than I probably should have thinking about my life. And the way I usually look at it is by asking two fundamental questions. The first question is “do I want to have a life?”. You might think this is a silly question to even ask, but since I was a teen I’ve always had a weird relationship with the concept of death, and as a result of that, the whole idea of being alive at all has never been an absolute certainty. Which is why I periodically ...

Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off again. I don’t know much about electronics, but I’ve been curious about whether it’s possible to fix old electronics for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect repair project because I might...